I-10 Bridge Rating Goes Up For 1st Time Since 2013! By ONE point.

Good news, everyone! The Calcasieu River bridge has officially earned its highest rating since 2013. Of course, it only went up by a single point, elevating its Sufficiency Rating from a terrifying 6.6 (out of 100) to a slightly less terrifying 7.6%.

The NBI report goes on to say that the structural elements of the bridge are “Basically intolerable, requiring high priority of corrective action.” The upside is that the deck geometry meets “minimum tolerable limits” - so we’ve got that going for us, which is nice.

Ultimately, the recommendation is “Replacement of bridge or other structure because of substandard load carrying capacity or substantial bridge roadway geometry” with an estimated cost of work at $33,754,000.

The keyword there is probably replacement, and not just, you know, continuing to endlessly slap a few Band-Aids on the problem while blocking up traffic for miles every few months.

The bridge's highest Sufficiency Rating on record was 42.9 in July of 1998 and 2000. One year later, in August of 2001, the rating dropped 18 points to 24.9, where it remained for six years before plummeting another 15 points to 9.9 in 2009, followed by a drop to 6.6 in May 2013.